Perception Engineer at moss (San Francisco, CA)
moss· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
Job description
About Us
At moss.ag, we build robots to go where humans won't, digitizing the physical outdoor world to make it machine-readable. Starting with tree farms — where a single field holds millions of plants no human has ever fully inventoried. 🌲🤯🌳
We’re a small team of practical engineers with a long-term vision. We focus on real, messy, on-the-ground problems today, while working toward a future where autonomous field robots make harsh outdoor jobs easier and safer.
If our mission aligns with how you work and think, we’d love to learn more about you!
The Role
Join us as a key founding engineer. We’re a small, fast-moving team of 7, developing novel perception systems and algorithms to interpret the physical world in challenging, real-world environments.
You will own the development and deployment of our 3D perception pipeline. This involves developing novel algorithms and multi-modal models (LiDAR, Camera, GPS & Environmental Data) for understanding farms and enabling autonomous robot operations.
We move quickly, solve hard problems, and are excited by the reactions we receive from our customers. We're looking for both full time (in-person) roles and intern candidates for co-ops, summer, and/or part-time.
Minimum Requirements
- Impressive real-world projects beyond the classroom (robotics, perception, mapping, autonomy, etc.)
- Hands-on experience with 3D sensor data (LiDAR, radar, depth cameras)
- Strong C++ (templates, smart pointers, STL containers, algorithms)
- Experience training ML models on custom datasets (data curation, labeling, training/eval loops)
- Experience with object detection, semantic segmentation, and/or classical CV / point-cloud methods (e.g., clustering, registration, tracking)
What You'll Do
- Own the full lifecycle of our 3D perception pipeline (research, prototype, production, deployment, iteration)
- Build multimodal models and pipelines that fuse LiDAR, cameras, GPS and metadata for 3D detection and analysis
- Design robust algorithms for outdoor environments (harsh shadows, lighting shifts, motion blur, dust, severe occlusions)
- Help build and maintain ML infrastructure for automated labeling, dataset management, training, and evaluation
- Optimize and deploy models for real-time performance on edge hardware (latency, throughput, memory)
- Explore new approaches like vision-language-action (VLA) models, imitation learning, and autonomy-oriented perception for robot tasks
Why work at moss
- Culture: Small, agile team (under 15 people) with a mission-driven focus on climate action. Rated 3.9/5 on employer review sites, with particularly high marks for compensation (4.3) and work-life balance (4.1).
- Great Place to Work®: Certified for three consecutive years (2022–2024), indicating strong internal culture.
- International exposure: Offices in Brazil, Spain, and Uruguay; remote/hybrid options are likely given the distributed team structure.
- Impact: Directly contributing to Amazon conservation and global carbon markets – a tangible climate impact.
- Tech stack: Works with blockchain, satellite imagery, big data, and ML – appealing for engineers interested in climate tech.
- Note on Careers Page: The provided careers link (jobs.gem.com/moss-ag) appears to correspond to a separate company (a farm robotics startup, Moss.ag). For Moss.earth-specific roles, candidates should visit moss.earth or its LinkedIn page.